As the hurricane season is starting to come to an end, I opened a poll about which storm(s) could be retired, with the list above including hurricanes/tropical cyclones that made landfall, caused more than minimal damage, and/or caused a lot of deaths.

My vote is for Hurricane Karl only, which caused billions of dollars in damage to the part of Mexico where it made landfall.

Karl caused over 3 BILLION $ in damage. Igor was almost a non - event with so much hype over something Bermuda was 110% prepared for. Alex hit a very unpopulated area. If they are going to retire earl then they should retire the current coastal storm in the western US - has produced 137mph wind gusts in some spots compared to earl which didnt even do 90 despite major hype.

(Off topic, but I'm still trying to figure out why Paloma was retired in 2008)

Looking at the revision history of the article in Wikipedia, when the storms of 2008 were retired it was estimated to have over 2 billion dollars of damage, and look how much that number got scaled down... it also only resulted in one indirect death, the lowest of any retired Atlantic hurricane according to Wikipedia (source).

It's obvious that Tomas won't cause the damage numbers that the others did since Haiti was already devastated by the earthquake. The deaths could be a different story though. I feel for our citizen soldiers from 175th MP BN who are down there trying to figure out what's the best situation regarding shelter for the Haitians.

The WMO retired the storm names from this hurricane season today (Source - scroll down to citation #90), and I was rather surprised with the names that were and weren't retired. They retired Igor and Tomas, but they surprisingly didn't retire Karl and Alex, both of which were very damaging storms. Here are the total votes: